Thursday, July 21, 2011

heil heidelberg

I am blogging v. early in case I don't have Internet access tonight. Chandlord and I are sitting on a bench in the Frankfurt airport train station, waiting for the train that will take us to Lepzig, where we will switch to a train that will take us to Berlin, where we will attempt to find the apartment we are renting. But despite the fact that we got up earlier than I ever like to (6am), we've had a lovely day so far. Even though last night's hotel was quite strange, their breakfast was acceptable, and so we fueled up before hitting the road to Frankfurt.

En route, it became clear that we had tons of time, and so we stopped off for an hour in Heidelberg, an ancient city with the oldest university in Germany. Our destination was not the university, though; instead, we wanted to check out Schloss Heidelberg, the ruined castle overlooking the city from vast heights above a hill. There isn't much left of the castle; it's all in ruins, with crumbling walls slowly descending into the grass filled moat (although I suppose that descent has been stopped by the town's desire to preserve the remnants and charge people money to see them). But even though the interiors are long destroyed, the exterior still has some wonderful masonry, sculpture, etc., and it was quite easy to imagine how imposing the castle would have been hundreds of years ago in all its glory. I took tons of pictures for my gargoyle research, so I am glad that we were able to stop; Heidelberg is a city that I will have to come back to, since an hour was not enough to do it justice.

And then we brought the car back to the airport, bid it a fond farewell, grabbed some Thai food from an airport restaurant, and sat down to wait for our train. And now I shall bid you a fond farewell as well - I will blog again sometime in Berlin!

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